Photo via Catsmob. Click to see the source.
Click the image to see the source.
If you print and cut out the illustration above and then glue the tabs, you’ll have more than just a cube — you’ll also have a tool that’ll help you teach kids (and hey, adults too) how to ask smarter questions.
If you roll it like a die, you’ll get one of three possible questions, each of which is a first step:
- Why is it actually…? “Why” questions are the first step in getting to the heart of a problem.
- What would happen if…? “What if?” questions are the first step toward creative solutions.
- How could I do that…? These are the first step toward developing practical solutions.
Michael van Riper, from whom I found about this die, writes:
Think about it: A four-year-old asks on average about 400 questions per day, and an adult hardly asks any. Our school system is structured around rewards for regurgitating the right answer, and not asking smart questions – in fact, it discourages asking questions. With the result that as we grow older, we stop asking questions. Yet asking good questions is essential to find and develop solutions, and important skill in innovation, strategy, and leadership. So why do we stop asking questions – and more importantly, why don’t we train each other, and our future leaders, to ask the right questions starting from early on?
This tool is meant to help children (and once again, adults) become better at asking questions, and smarter ones too.
Here’s how you use it, according to van Riper:
Pick up your favorite illustrated fairy tale book – the kind of book you’d read a two-year-old for bedtime stories. On each page, roll the cube and answer the question together. I’ll bet you’d be surprised by what turns Little Red Riding Hood can take… and more importantly, I’ll bet that after a while, you and your child will both start asking these questions more often than not!
Never mind bedtime stories — I can think of more than a few corporate settings where this die would be very useful.
This ad for the Japanese telecom company NTT DoCoMo starts off like a cooking show, but it soon becomes clear that something’s a little odd. This is Japan, after all:
We’ve got shrimp in tubes, flour in some kind of dispenser:
Now we’re loading a tank with egg yolks:
And the ever-so-necessary Big Red Button to start things with a bang:
When I said “start things with a bang,” I was being literal:
Here’s what happened from another angle:
And here’s a step-by-step close-up. First, the shrimp are launched from the tubes with a big blast of compressed air…
…and into the path of the flour, which is launched at precisely the right moment…
…then the egg yolks…
…can’t forget the panko…
…some heat to cook it…
…and after all that, they rebound off the target and onto the plate:
Apparently, all this was done to demonstrate the speed of their cellular LTE network. Now that you’ve seen the stills, go watch the video below!
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Black Friday post #4: Priorities
As George Takei quips: “Perhaps we should hold elections on the last Friday of November, with polling stations at Wal-Mart, Target and Apple.”
Found via George Takei.
You’ve seen the Star Wars teaser trailer, but have you seen the LEGO Star Wars teaser trailer?
It’s got LEGO John Boyega:
…and LEGO new-droid-on-a-ball…
…LEGO Daisy Ridley…
…LEGO mysterious-new-Sith-lord…
…and the LEGO Millennium Falcon!
Enough teasing — here’s the LEGO trailer!
Practice, practice, and more practice:
This year’s Black Friday Death Count
Black Friday Death Count’s leaderboard says that Black Friday 2014 resulted in 8 deaths and 96 injuries.
I wouldn’t have counted the murder attempt/suicide at the Nordstrom in Chicago. That’s not violence or injury as a result of marketing-generated shopping madness, but a domestic assault carried out on someone who was working at a retail store on the day.
More and more of the Black Friday incidents on their list are taking place in the U.K., where they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but have borrowed the post-Thanksgiving shopping gimmick from their cousins across the pond.
The violent history of Black Friday
Here’s Machinima’s entertaining history of Black Friday, which wasn’t always a term used the way we use it today:
The science behind why people kill each other over TVs on the Friday after Thanksgiving
The photo above shows two sets of shoppers in Wembley, an area of northwest London (and remember, I mentioned earlier that Thanksgiving isn’t a tradition in the UK), fighting over a TV. It appears along with an article in the British paper The Independent, where they say that we’re hardwired in such a way that under the right set of circumstances, we will commit acts of violence, and Black Friday lines up those circumstances all too well.
Last year’s Black Friday Haiku, just because
I’ll close with Kenzie Lind’s three greatest sequential tweets from last year, which became an accidental haiku (right down to the 5 – 7 – 5 syllable scheme) that captures Black Friday so well:
